22nd April 2018, 6:19 AM
Re: contests being a status thing, this was definitely a problem on JV. The absurd level of formality made actually getting a contest accepted a milestone — how many people created "unofficial" contests just because they were waiting for acceptance?
First of all, I doubt there's any real need for contest-specific forum sections. People have a million other ways to organize contests, such as dedicated Discord servers, that are much more effective. From what I remember of JV's contest-related sections, they were essentially a glorified chat server — and there's no point in turning a forum into a chat server when actual chat solutions exist.
If contest-specific forum sections are gone, there's only one thing that needs administrative oversight, and that is the ability to award official prizes (e.g., PR2 parts). For that reason, I'd consider taking the opposite approach to the one you're taking now: let contests organize themselves, and once a contest is settled into something the community likes, approach the contest owner(s) privately and discuss the possibility of awarding prizes, including whatever changes the contest would need to make to become fairer or somehow better. (Or just let people approach you, but without the absurd level of formality that it requires nowadays. A simple "hey, can my contest award prizes?" Ask a Mod thread is definitely more than enough.)
As of right now, you have a 1,200-word document describing the rules for a contest. This seemed like a good idea when it was made, but time showed that this is just a great way to encourage people to think that running a contest is a goal by itself. You require the contest owner to have 200 posts on the forum (because we all know that someone with 150 posts cannot run a contest, right?), there's too much focus on judges to the point that "getting the Nth judge" is a milestone in itself for a contest (despite the right number of judges for a contest can very well be zero — consider an extreme "random user of the fortnight" contest), there's a whole approval process that just doesn't need to be there (I trust your ability to reply to Ask a Mod posts with "I think this is OK; let's see what the rest of the staff thinks"), and there's even a disciplinary process that definitely doesn't need to be there at all.
All in all, this contributes to making the whole contest environment excessively formal, which in turn imbues the contest owner position with an aura of power and achievement that it simply shouldn't have. Do consider that JV did have games and contests before the prize system was created — good ones remained popular simply because they were fun, and bad ones vanished.
I'd seriously recommend dropping the whole formal contest system that has been developed over the years; it has shown to foster a system where making or running a contest is a goal in and of itself. Instead, I'd propose switching to the straightforward and simple approach of reaching out to good/popular contests and letting people contact you in case you miss some, and just give and monitor prize-awarding permissions to these people. In fact, given the level of staff activity we have nowadays, you can even completely do away with this permission and just grant prizes yourselves when contest winners are picked.
I know it seems like a hard decision to drop the formal framework that has been developed over the years, given that so many people (me included, back on JV) spent much time on it polishing it and fixing things. But in the end, it just seems unnecessary nowadays.
First of all, I doubt there's any real need for contest-specific forum sections. People have a million other ways to organize contests, such as dedicated Discord servers, that are much more effective. From what I remember of JV's contest-related sections, they were essentially a glorified chat server — and there's no point in turning a forum into a chat server when actual chat solutions exist.
If contest-specific forum sections are gone, there's only one thing that needs administrative oversight, and that is the ability to award official prizes (e.g., PR2 parts). For that reason, I'd consider taking the opposite approach to the one you're taking now: let contests organize themselves, and once a contest is settled into something the community likes, approach the contest owner(s) privately and discuss the possibility of awarding prizes, including whatever changes the contest would need to make to become fairer or somehow better. (Or just let people approach you, but without the absurd level of formality that it requires nowadays. A simple "hey, can my contest award prizes?" Ask a Mod thread is definitely more than enough.)
As of right now, you have a 1,200-word document describing the rules for a contest. This seemed like a good idea when it was made, but time showed that this is just a great way to encourage people to think that running a contest is a goal by itself. You require the contest owner to have 200 posts on the forum (because we all know that someone with 150 posts cannot run a contest, right?), there's too much focus on judges to the point that "getting the Nth judge" is a milestone in itself for a contest (despite the right number of judges for a contest can very well be zero — consider an extreme "random user of the fortnight" contest), there's a whole approval process that just doesn't need to be there (I trust your ability to reply to Ask a Mod posts with "I think this is OK; let's see what the rest of the staff thinks"), and there's even a disciplinary process that definitely doesn't need to be there at all.
All in all, this contributes to making the whole contest environment excessively formal, which in turn imbues the contest owner position with an aura of power and achievement that it simply shouldn't have. Do consider that JV did have games and contests before the prize system was created — good ones remained popular simply because they were fun, and bad ones vanished.
I'd seriously recommend dropping the whole formal contest system that has been developed over the years; it has shown to foster a system where making or running a contest is a goal in and of itself. Instead, I'd propose switching to the straightforward and simple approach of reaching out to good/popular contests and letting people contact you in case you miss some, and just give and monitor prize-awarding permissions to these people. In fact, given the level of staff activity we have nowadays, you can even completely do away with this permission and just grant prizes yourselves when contest winners are picked.
I know it seems like a hard decision to drop the formal framework that has been developed over the years, given that so many people (me included, back on JV) spent much time on it polishing it and fixing things. But in the end, it just seems unnecessary nowadays.
